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Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas: In honor of John V. Singler
Edited by Cecelia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić and Philipp Angermeyer
[Creole Language Library 53] 2017
► pp. 23–48

Population factors, multilingualism and the emergence of grammar

John Singler’s work on substrate influence in the emergence of Atlantic creoles has shown that population factors (i.e., the ethnic distribution of the African founder population) as well as typological (dis)similarities between the languages in contact are crucial for understanding how new language varieties develop. In light of this view, this chapter discusses population factors on the Slave Coast in the 17th and early 18th centuries in order to determine the ethnic distribution of the Africans deported to Suriname and Haiti. Building on newly established socio-historical facts, this chapter further investigates the development of adpositions in Sranan: a case study of the emergence of grammar in multi-ethnic context.

Keywords: population factors, slave coast, adposition, hybrid structures
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Slavery on the Slave Coast: The Kingdom of Allada
  • 3.Creole languages and language change
  • 4.The recombination of syntactic features: The na-inni code
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 12 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.53.02abo
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